In Memoriam: John L. Young, Cryptome Co-Founder
9 comments
·May 15, 20250xbadcafebee
This reminds me that you have to be a little crazy to resist some of the most powerful forces in our world. You basically have to say, I'm willing to sacrifice my life, be willing to be thrown in jail, be bankrupted, etc, just to keep people informed. There's no personal benefit here. And nobody's going to stop him on the street and thank him for keeping the powerful honest. In today's world, we definitely need more crazies for good. (And we need more organizations formed to help protect them!)
TheAmazingRace
Fun side note: he accepted straight cash in the mail, but never accepted cryptocurrency as an option for donations. He was quite old school.
R.I.P. John L. Young
spanktheuser
I miss the sense of possibility, anarchy, and resistance of the early internet. RIP.
WarOnPrivacy
John Young was every inch an example. He took time for anyone. Cryptome was the very best thing the internet could be.
baruchthescribe
Classy obiturary by the EFF. Cryptome seems to have been around forever in internet terms - I just checked and indeed it's been almost 30 years. RIP John, your site was Wikileaks long before Wikileaks.
os2warpman
John was used by Wikileaks, registered the original Wikileaks domain, was blacklisted by Wikileaks insiders when he started questioning their financial (and "other") irregularities, and ended up cryptome'ing Wikileaks.
His site was not Wikileaks, he operated with morals and integrity. An example of this is how he had questions about how Wikileaks was publicized as a non-profit, when it was a project of The Sunshine Press-- a for-profit Icelandic corporation. Then the Wau Holland audit lies, selective releases, excessive and unaccounted-for spending, and obsession with money and publicity were all targets of his criticism.
John could smell the rot from a thousand miles away.
https://cryptome.org/wikileaks/wikileaks-leak.htm
"Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign against legitimate dissent. Same old shit, working for the enemy." -John Young, on Wikileaks
John was a G. The O.G. His "Eyeballing" series was the beginning of web-based OSINT.
unit149
[dead]
aaron695
[dead]
This is sad. I met him. Cryptome had an electric effect on me the first time I came across it - it was a leaked (?) gsm A3A8 authentication + session key generation algorithm document. I was fiercely interested in that at the time. I then started following cryptome near-religiously and one time, when I happened to be in NYC, arranged in in-person-meet with John Young so I could buy some copies of his cd archive, signed. I gave one or two away to friends. He joked that his hat was “hiding his lobotomy scars” (I think). Was short but special real life meeting.